The First Prison Sentence From the Mueller Investigation Is Here

Being first isn’t always something to celebrate: Dutch lawyer Alex van der Zwaan became the first person to be sentenced in Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election on Tuesday. Van der Zwaan was the fourth person to plead guilty to charges from the Mueller probe, including Donald Trump adviser George Papadopoulos, former national security advisor Michael Flynn, and former Trump campaign deputy chairman Rick Gates. Van der Zwaan will serve 30 days in prison and pay a $20,000 fine.

Van der Zwaan, a London-based lawyer whose father-in-law is a Russian billionaire, pled guilty in February and read from an apology statement at his sentencing on Tuesday in which he said: “What I did was wrong.” (What he did was cover up discussions he and Gates had with a contact based in Ukraine in September 2016, and later lie to Mueller’s investigators as they dug into Gates and Gates’s then boss, Paul Manafort.)

A notable difference between how Mueller’s team sentenced Van der Zwaan and how they treated, say, Gates is that Van der Zwaan does not appear to be cooperating with the investigation—Gates took a plea deal and is seemingly still working to help investigators. It appears that, according to a statement in court today, Van der Zwaan didn’t fully “flip”; his sentencing is evidence that evading Mueller, and lying to federal agents, is no joke.

Mueller has indicted or gotten guilty pleas from 19 people and three companies so far in his investigation, including 13 Russian nationals. Though none of the charges directly allege that Trump associates or campaign workers worked with Russia to meddle in the presidential election, pundits following the investigation closely seized on a court filing on Monday that suggests that the Justice Department is fully backing Mueller, which is sure to get Trump’s back up—or at least his Twitter account.

The filing included an August 2017 memo in which, according to CNN, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told Mueller that “he should investigate allegations that President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was ‘colluding with Russian government officials’ to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.” The memo and Rosenstein’s direct mention of the election matter are notable because Manafort and his representatives have said that the charges he faces in Washington, D.C., and Virginia have nothing to do with his work for Trump’s election campaign. And, of course, Trump maintains that he is “looking forward” to talking to Mueller himself. It remains to be seen whether today’s events will change his tune.